Can you round up $68,500 in ready or borrowed cash? If so you can be the owner of a furnished beach house in Mexico and can cut your monthly living expenses in half. Or just have a cheap place to be a snowbird or go on vacation.

About a year and a half ago I announced on this blog that my Yucatan beach house in Mexico was for sale. Well, it still is.

We took it off the market a while during the rainy season and while it’s being rented a lot right now in high season, it’s still waiting for a buyer.

We own this place free and clear, so it’s not like there’s a mortgage gnawing at us, but we bought another house in Guanajuato, in the central highlands. We’re moving into that one come August for two years. We’d like to have the cash from house 1 to get debt free and flush so we’ve got plenty to put into beautifying house 2.

As you may have heard on the news, the housing market in the U.S. is in recovery mode now, to the point where there are bidding wars again in some cities because of a lack of inventory. While some savvy investors no doubt bought houses for $68,500 or even less the past few years because of bank foreclosures, they weren’t getting property one house back from a beach and those homes weren’t usually nice enough to be move-in ready. This one is both.

You can follow the link at the bottom for more details, but this is a well-maintained 2BR, 1 bath house with a nice covered outside terrace and plenty of room to build up or put in a pool. It’s a 30-second walk to the water and three blocks to the town square. There are already local caretakers in place we’ve worked with for years. It comes with beds that sleep four and all the other furniture there now, plus a fridge, dishes, and a bottle of 100% agave tequila we’ll supply upon closing.

This beach house is 40 minutes from the international airport in Merida, a city of a million, or less than four hours by rental car from Cancun.

If you’re wondering about home prices in Mexico in other non-tourist places, we paid a shade less than $90,000 for the Guanajuato house. It has four bedrooms, two baths, with a big sun room on the top floor that has terrific views. But right now it’s got a kitchen that we hate and no furniture…

So buy this bargain Yucatan beach house for $68,500 bringing just a toothbrush and a bathing suit. Then come stay with us later in the revamped city one. Full details here: cheap furnished Mexican beach house.

I’ve spent a lot of time in multiple states in Mexico, lived there for a year, and have a house in Guanajuato I’ll return to for two years as of next summer. Here are the two books I’d recommend the strongest for anyone interested in lowering their expenses and dialing back the stress level by moving south. Both are new editions released this year.

Living Abroad in Mexico

This is a great nuts-and-bolts guide to what you need to know about moving to Mexico. It’s heavy on the kind of practical information any future expat is clamoring for: visas, housing, health care, shipping, telecom, transportation, and language. It’s written by Julie Doherty Meade, an American who spent nearly a decade living in Mexico and traveling around the country (she’s now in NYC).

Even though I lived in Mexico and own real estate there, I learned some things from this book I didn’t know for the next time around. It’s a thorough guide that does what any good moving abroad book should: answer the questions you do have and then answer the ones you hadn’t even thought of yet.

There’s a good array of history and cultural information that will help you understand how the country works, which is essential with a neighbor that’s so close, yet so different. Some will probably complain that the section on where to live leaves out a lot of great areas for expats, but look at a map of Mexico and you’ll understand why. This is a big country with 30-some states, not a small dot like Costa Rica or Belize. So naturally the million or so expatriates have spread out far and wide. She highlights where the majority of them are concentrated. Go there for more people like you, go elsewhere for fewer of them.

After all the info presented, there’s a good resources section at the end for more. This book comes in at 488 pages, including some photos, and it’s a great reference for both dreamers and doers. I’ll be pulling it out a few times before I move back and will definitely bring it down across the border for my Mexican home. Follow these links to buy it from Amazon U.S., Amazon Canada, or Amazon UK.

People’s Guide to Mexico

The first book listed here is objective, efficient, and to the point. The People’s Guide to Mexico, however, is none of that—and is far more fun to read as a result. I’ve said before that this is my favorite guidebook of all time and this new edition has only reinforced that view. This is a book so filled with a love for Mexico in all its quirks and annoyances that every page sparkles with enjoyable prose. It’s the only guidebook I can think of where I’ve read 50 pages in a stretch because I was enjoying it so much, not because I had any questions I needed answering or had nothing else to read on a bus.

The authors, who have lived and traveled in Mexico since the 1970s, don’t just give you dry facts about the 2nd-class bus system. They give you nuggets like this:

The only time I’ve driven a fast car in Mexico, I was passed by a second-class bus traveling at over 80 miles per hour. This wasn’t unusual, nor were the three young men on the rear bumper. The one reading a comic book, however, without holding on, seemed abnormally blasé.

You get opinionated, experience-filled lines like that over and over on pulque bars, roadside cantinas, haggling in vegetable markets, and finding a house to rent.

Carl Franz and Lorena Hayens put the first one of these out 35 years ago and if they had stopped along the way, we’d say, “They don’t write them like that anymore.” Thankfully we don’t have to because they didn’t stop. This is the 14th edition, with 768 pages of hard-learned lessons and the kind of insight you only get from someone who can speak fluent Spanish in a way that includes all the idioms and street slang unique to Mexico.

If you have any interest at all in spending real time in Mexico, living there or just getting away from the sheltering resort areas, spend some quality time with this gem of a book. Read it through and you’ll know more about the country than half the people in Ajijic. Get it at Amazon, Amazon Canada, or Amazon UK.

The cover story in the current issue of Travelworld is from yours truly, a piece on the reasons to get away from the beaches and visit the middle of Mexico instead. This is the old part, the colonial part, the area with the most interesting architecture. And for most of the spots profiled, these are great value destinations as well.

In the article, which is accompanied by some nice photos I took while living there for a year, are the spots you should head to if you have some time to move around. These are the real gems of the region: Zacatecas, Morelia, Patzcuaro, San Miguel de Allende, and Guanajuato (where I lived for a year and will return to next year.)

Even in San Miguel, which has some 10,000 foreigners living there, you’ll see as many or more domestic tourists as foreign ones. That means prices that the locals can bear, not prices meant for celebs and dot-com millionaires like you find in Los Cabos.

Read the article for the rest of the story. It’s on the Issu platform, which means you can read it like a regular magazine, flipping the pages and seeing large photos. Or you can just check out the HTML version here.

Hasta pronto!

Your turn to host the party!

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with my Mexican beach house on the Gulf coast of the Yucatan. I still like the house a lot and I’m not in dire straits financially. But for two reasons it’s up for sale:

1) For family reasons we moved to Tampa Bay in July, near a string of some of the best beaches in the U.S., so having a beach house that requires a plane ride to get to is kind of silly now.

2) I’m buying a different Mexican house where we just spent a year, in Guanajuato. So some cash from here is going there.

You can read the whole description on the real estate listing at the agency site: Chuburna Beach House for Sale.

I’ll buck conventional sales wisdom and tell you the price first: $69,500. Yes indeed, just one house back from the beach, furnished, ready to move in, for less than 70 grand U.S. (Take that, House Hunters International!) Just bring a bathing suit, a t-shirt, and a toothbrush and you’re ready to go. It even comes with a hammock for your first siesta. We’ll hook you up with our caretaker/ house cleaner couple so you can rent it out remotely as well.

The house has two bedrooms (one with a double, one with two twins) a large living/kitchen area, a big covered terrace, and a bathroom. There’s a covered carport for one car.

Unlike many locations on this coast, this one is just three blocks from the town square in Chuburna. You can walk there in a few minutes and you don’t even have to get in a car to hit a restaurant or go to a convenience store. All the carrying costs are cheap: utilities have never topped $80 even when in full use all month and annual taxes are about as much as a few bottles of tequila.

You do have to pay about $600 a year for the stupid fideicomiso though, which is like a land trust tax for foreigners buying near the coast. (It doesn’t apply in the interior). There’s also not much chance of getting financing in Mexico. Most people pay cash, get a home equity loan on their main residence, or find another way to borrow some cash stateside.

The closest city is lovely Merida, with an international airport. It’s sometimes cheaper to fly to Cancun four hours away and drive or bus it. But you do have a real milllion-plus population city 40 minutes away and lots to do nearby in this land of Mayan ruins and cenotes. The town itself is usually a sleepy fishing village though, with houses not hotels. It only gets hopping on holiday weekends and part of the summer.

There are a good number of gringos in this area now if you don’t relish the idea of being stuck speaking Spanish all the time, especially in the winter when the Canadian snowbirds come down. With a homicide rate lower than 2 per 100,000, Yucatan State has a lower crime rate than nearly all of the United States and a chunk of Canada as well.

You can see video tours of the inside below and the outside here. Contact the agent for any info on buying after you visit the listing. You can also see more photos and what we get for rent at our vacation rentals listing. If you’re serious but want the inside scoop, here’s my contact info.

My wife and I have enjoyed this house, I did a lot of book writing there, and my daughter has been going to it since she was 4. She’s now 11, so obviously we liked it. It’s just not right for our future: when we return to Mexico we’re going to live there for two years, so we want to be in a city again.

I was writing about Mexico a lot while I was living there for a year, so I gave it a break for a bit. But I’ve been holding on to these photos ever since attending the Feria de Leon in the state of Guanajuato’s largest city – Leon.

This is supposedly the second-biggest state fair in Mexico and it seemed like half the population of the state was there when we attended on its final weekend. Should you want to go, it’s January 13 to February 6 in 2012 and roughly that same time each year. It’s right off the main big thoroughfare going through the city (and to the bus station), so it’s easy to get there on public transportation.

When you get inside, it’s a madhouse. There are things you would expect at a fair, like animals winning blue ribbons, junk food, and carnival rides. But everything seems to have a bit of a Mexican twist to it. Some of it was easy to figure out—like getting your photo taken sitting on top of a giant cebu. Other parts, not so much—like the freaky-looking guy with glitter on his eyelids who was in charge of the petting zoo.

We had a few goals in mind before we entered the gates. One was to check out a Lucha Libre wrestling match. It didn’t start out as very promising when “Smooth Operator” by Sade played twice on the sound system before the match. Not exactly music to get the aggression going. Plus the fakeness of this fake wrestling was a little too apparent with the first match. The amateurs aren’t even good at faking a fight, apparently.

They got better though, and so did the music. By the end it was acrobatic guys that almost made it look like they were hitting each other. Watching the crowd was just as fun, as was the parade of snacks for sale: apples covered with chili sauce, cotton candy in four colors, potato chips covered with hot sauce and limes.

We also planned to eat our way around the grounds and were successful on that count. At the prices above ($1 = 12 pesos) it wasn’t hard. They take their food stalls seriously in Mexico and there were probably 100 of them around, all busy. We got huaraches, tacos, shrimp on a stick, giant burritos, and other goodies. But this sign below was the best.

If you get a chance to check out a voladores show in Mexico, it’s a real treat. Elaborately dressed men climb to the top of a very high pole, rope themselves onto it, and fly through the air. They slowly get closer and closer to the ground while whirling around the pole. All the while another man is on a small platform at the top, playing a flute and hopping around. It gives me the willies just thinking about sitting up there, much less in his position.

Here’s a close-up of the guy who was moving around on the top, playing that flute. He’s been doing this a while it looks like, so I guess he’s used to it.

My daughter and I did the rounds of the games to win some prizes. In one booth you could win a giant stuffed cigarette. In another, loaves of Bimbo bread. She got a little toy from shooting a cap gun but our big score was when we played the loteria game. We put down our bets on which pictures would come up (the drunk, the scorpion, and the devil were my faves) and scored boxes of cookies.

She also dug the rides, especially the one where a guy blew up big plastic bubbles with a leaf blower and the kids bumped around inside them on top of a pool of water. Big fun!